Future Events

At no time before have so many people lived alone, and never has loneliness been so widely or keenly felt. Why, in a society of individualists, is living alone perceived as a shameful failure?

And can we ever be happy on our own?

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Drawing on personal experience, as well as philosophy and sociology, Daniel Schreiber explores the tension between the desire for solitude and freedom, and for companionship, intimacy and love. Along the way he illuminates the role that friendships play in our lives – can they be a response to the loss of meaning in a world in crisis? 

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The most moving, memorable books are the ones that attempt to answer questions that the author has been struggling with for his entire life. In Alone, Daniel Schreiber – a beautiful writer and, just as important, a beautiful thinker – explores the questions of not just his life, but our age: Who am I if no one loves me? What are the limits of friendship? How does one live with deep and profound loneliness?

This is a book for not just this year, but this era.

- Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life and To Paradise

 

A profoundly enlightening book on how we want to live, Alone spent almost a year on Germany’s bestseller list.

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Tickets £4, BOOKING REQUIRED 

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Tickets are £4 each. Ticket holders will enjoy a discount off the book.

There will also be complimentary drinks available thanks to the publisher Reaktion Books. 

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If you are on a low income and would like to attend this event but don't have the funds, email Uli at gaystheword@gmail.com putting the words 'Alone Event Access' no later than August 28th. 

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Daniel Schreiber has written a brave and searching vindication of single life, a book about the cultivation and tending of solitude, about solitude as an art. Amid the bewildering loss of everydayness imposed by the pandemic, when solitude was not chosen but enforced, Schreiber creates in these pages a moving conversation – with philosophers and poets, theorists and novelists – about the sources of value in our lives. By multiplying our sense of those sources, by insisting on the dignity of models of life that have sometimes been disparaged, this book finally becomes a document of liberation. 

- Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You and Cleanness

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Photo credit © Christian Werner